


the things we left behind

by hydrospanners



Series: renegade [18]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Mid-Class Story, Right Before the Fortress, set during Chapter 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 13:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14402940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: With the most dangerous mission of her life looming on the horizon, Jedi Knight Nirea Velaran will do whatever is necessary to keep her brother out of it, even if it means venturing down roads she never thought she’d walk again.





	the things we left behind

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr (titled 'everything we left behind.'). Maybe the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written.

The last fifteen years had been kind to Coronet City. Even from the penthouse of an Uptown skyscraper, Nirea Velaran could see the difference in her childhood home. Patches of light and activity that had been gang territory before, edges of the horizon that used to be suburban wilderness now dotted with chrome towers like crooked teeth. Even the smog seemed less dense, the sky clear enough that she could see as far west as the Valley, where industrial lights winked in and out like coy little stars.

Glutting on wartime profits, her home had grown fat and clean. Too like Coruscant for her comfort.

Rea turned her back on the windows, stomach clenching. Hopefully the view would be different from the ground, from the Blues and the Shipyards and all the uglier sectors that had formed the grimy backdrop of her youth. Hopefully she was just looking at it from the wrong angle, the wrong place.

Hopefully she would live to see a second homecoming.

The lights flicked on overhead and Nirea turned to face the door. A tall man, wrinkled and white-haired but not yet stooped by age, lingered at the threshold, hand frozen over the control panel.

She waited.

After a long hesitation, the man let his hand fall to his side, turning from her as he settled his coat and valise neatly in the entry closet. He removed his boots and emptied his pockets. Scrubbed his hands with sanitizer kept on the console table.

Finally, entering the room in socked feet, he examined her with narrow eyes. “You’ve got taller.”

Well. At least he recognized her.

“Redarr.” Rea nodded, pseudo-respectful. “It’s been a long time.”

Not long enough, said the old man’s answering frown. “How is your brother?”

“Alive.”

Redarr nodded, as if he hadn’t expected anything more. “I hear you’ve done well for yourself,” he said.

Thinking of the  _Renegade_ , of the crew she loved and the work that propelled her ever-forward, Rea nodded. She had done well for herself. She'd done well for other people, too.

“Hero of Tython.” Redarr shook his head, his gaze landing on the window behind her. Like he was physically incapable of looking at her. Maybe he believed the old legend about meeting a Jedi’s eyes. He was every inch as Corellian as Ranna, and Force knew she’d believed it. “I still think of you as that angry little girl, always filthy and starting trouble.”

“I don’t think of you at all,” Rea said honestly. And not entirely without malice.

“No,” the old man agreed. “I can’t imagine that you do.”

There was a part of her, a very stupid and very petty part, that wanted to unnerve him. To discompose him. To  _shock_ him. Why else had she skulked around in his apartment in the dark, like a predator lying in wait? This could have been done just as easily with a holocall, or else she could have rung the bell like a normal person. For all she’d told herself it was for his protection, to save him from being linked with her (‘No no, no relation to that Velaran’), Nirea had never been good at self-deception.

Time to get to the point.

“This isn’t a social visit,” she said.

“I gathered.”

There was no need to offer details or reasons. She didn’t owe him explanations. She didn’t owe him anything. “You’re going to tell my brother about Deena’s condtion.” It was not a request.

“You could tell him yourself,” Redarr pointed out. If it bothered him that she’d known, known and never visited, he didn’t show it. “He’d be more like to believe  _you_.”

Nirea almost laughed. How little he knew, how much he’d missed. How much he might have prevented if he hadn’t–-

No point dwelling on what-ifs and could-have-beens. It was done now, and time marched on whether you liked it or not. “You need to invite him here,” she said evenly. “To see her while he still can.”

Redarr finally turned, his wrinkled frown deeper, eyes narrowed to dark slits. “Why? He never cared to know her in life. Why should he care now that she’s dying?”

Old bastard. Why couldn’t he just say ‘yes’ and be grateful for the opportunity? Why couldn’t he just love them like he was supposed to? What the hell was wrong with him? (A voice, insidious and cold and buried deep in the darkest recesses of her heart, wondered if she wasn’t asking the wrong question. ‘What is wrong with  _you_ , Nirea Velaran, that the old man can’t see anything worth loving?’)

(Fuck that voice.)

“Rhese thinks she’s already dead. He thinks you both are.”

Redarr nodded, thoughtful. “Your fiction?” He asked. “Or Ranna’s?”

“Mine,” she lied.

This did not surprise him. He turned his attention back to the skyline, lights glittering on the horizon. “I’ll do you the favor of believing this is unrelated to our recent good fortune.” It took every inch of Rea’s training to resist the impulse to deck him. “I hear modest living is part of your Code, so it can’t be inheritance you’re after.”

“I don’t give a shit about inheritance,” Rea snapped. He couldn’t honestly believe all those credits just fell in his lap exactly when he needed them. He had to know. The bastard  _had_ to know what she'd done for him. “And I’m not in the habit of explaining myself. Not to the Senate, not to the Council, and sure as hell not to you,  _Grandfather_.”

Rea scowled at him, pushing away from the column, all pretense of composure forgotten. Redarr took the smallest of steps back, arms folded over his chest. Defensive posture. He was unsettled.  _Good_.

“You will send a message to Rhese about who you are and what’s happening to Deena,” she commanded. “You will invite him to stay here until she passes.”

The old man frowned. She tried not see Ranna in the expression, tried not to see Rhese or her half-remembered father. Tried not to see herself. “What makes you think he’d come?”

“He will.”

“I wasn’t aware Jedi were allowed personal leave.”

The Jedi had stolen her life from her. They’d taken a lost, frightened child and tricked her into becoming their weapon. Now they were sending her on what may well be a suicide mission. They owed her this much. They didn’t realize it yet, but she would make them see it her way. Later. Once this was done.  _Better to ask forgiveness than permission_ , Liss’ voice trilled in the back of her mind.

“What we are and aren’t allowed is none of your business,” Rea said, icily. Before she could think better of it, she added, “You lost that right years ago.”

Redarr nodded, as if he’d been expecting this. She hated that, hated that a man she’d never known found her so damned predictable. She hated that she couldn’t be more indifferent.

It wasn’t that she cared about the old bastard. He’d never wanted her so Rea had never troubled to want him. The galaxy was a big place. She’d found plenty of people to fill whatever real estate he’d left vacant in her heart. Families were bound by choice, not blood, and her grandparents had chosen to abandon her. Twice. As far as Nirea was concerned, Redarr and Deena Velaran could go fuck themselves. But her brother…

Rhese ached for the family he’d never really known. The parents that had shoved him in a box and shipped him off to Corellia for his own protection; the sister who’d screamed and wept at being left behind; the grandparents he’d thought dead since before his birth. Rhese wasn’t like her; he needed to see the shape of the path behind him before he could find his way forward.

“He’ll need to stay for a month at least,” Rea said. If she wasn’t back by then, she wasn’t coming back at all.

“Deena may not have a month,” Redarr sighed and she could feel his sorrow, thick and cold and stifling.

The man was losing his wife. Slowly. Piece by agonizing piece. And then what would he have? This penthouse? Memories? All three of their children were dead, and they’d forsaken their only grandchildren more than a decade ago.

Nirea swore. She was doing him a fucking favor, wasn’t she? The old bastard needed Rhese as much as she needed him to keep Rhese occupied. “Just keep him here,” she said. Snapped. “I don’t care how you do it. Tie him up with funeral arrangements, with your own health. You can  _literally_ tie him up for all I care. Just keep him here.”

 _Keep him safe_.

Redarr, for all his failings, was not an idiot. He was a Velaran after all. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“I’m about to be,” she confessed. Lying about it would not get her what she wanted. “The highly classified kind of trouble. The kind I may not come back from.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

The old man hesitated. He brought one hand to his chin, stroking thoughtfully as he studied her. It was only years of Jedi training that kept her from squirming under that penetrating stare. “Do you have any idea how like him you are?” Redarr asked quietly.

Nirea did not have to ask who he was talking about.

“You were so young when you came here. Can you even remember him?”

How could she forget those dark earnest eyes, so very like her brother’s? ‘ _Safety is secrecy_ ,’ he would say, and those eyes would crinkle up. Mama would swat at him, tell him to be serious, but her father was always laughing about something. Right up until he put them in that damned box.

‘ _Take care of your brother, Turhaya. You’re all he has_.’

“I remember,” Rea said.

“He was the most energetic child I’ve ever seen. And so sure of himself. So sure of everything.” Redarr smiled, eyes growing distant as he lost himself in memories.

Hopefully someone would be kind enough to shoot her if she got so nostalgic in her old age.

Hopefully she would live to see old age.

“He had these ideas about how things should be and he just–-He made them that way. Never bothered with permission or other people’s comfort. If you didn’t like it, he would just go around you. Over your head. Under your feet if necessary.” The old man’s smile faded. “And eventually, it killed him.”

The ‘ _and it will kill you too_ ’ went unsaid.

For a moment, her heart stuttered. Hopes and dreams she’d long forgot swelled to the surface, as full and tempting as when her child’s heart had still been tender enough to nurse them.

The moment passed quickly. Nirea’s heart had hardened years ago, battered into a strange, sharp-edged shape that spared no room for the grandparents she’d left behind. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not here to dredge up the past, Redarr. I don’t want your warnings or regrets or any of your shit. All I want from you-–all I have  _ever_ wanted from you-–is for you to take care of my brother. Are you going to do that, or do I need to bring an executive order?”

Saresh might give her one. The newly-minted Supreme Chancellor owed her.

“I only ever wanted what was best for Rhese,” Redarr answered after a too-long pause. “I only ever wanted what was best for you both.”

Rea raised her eyes to the ceiling in frustration. She could hear the combined voices of every master she’d ever had, a ringing chorus of admonishment in the back of her head. ‘ _Patience, Padawan_ ,’ they echoed each other. ‘ _There is no emotion, there is peace_.’

“I don’t know how I could be more clear about this,” she sighed, returning her gaze to Redarr’s. “ _I don’t give a shit_.”

He blinked.

“Do you understand now?” She asked the question slow and clear, as though her grandfather were a particularly obtuse child.

Redarr nodded, his expression shifting back to placid indifference. “Yes,” he said blandly, “I believe I do.”

“Good.” Rea checked her chrono. Time was up. “You’ll send him a message first thing tomorrow morning. Ask him to come immediately. He’ll want to know why you never contacted him before.” She paused, taking a deep breath to gather her courage. “Blame me. Tell him I intercepted your messages. Tell him I kept you apart. Tell him whatever you have to.”

“If that’s what you wish,” Redarr said.

“It is. Any questions?”

“Just one.”

Fuck. “What?”

“Will you see Deena? Before you leave?”

 _Fuck_. “Why the hell should I?” Rea snarled. Audacity ran in the family it seemed. “Who is she to me?”

“She is your grandmother,” Redarr explained patiently. “Your family.”

Rea only just resisted the urge to bash in his godsdamned teeth. “I only have one grandmother,” she snapped, “and she died while I was rotting in CorSec detention.” She had to get out of this place before she did something stupid. Something stupid-er than coming here in the first place. “Call Rhese in the morning. Get him here by week’s end and we’ll be square. You’ll never hear from me again.” She glared at the old man, her grandfather, and reached out with the Force, lancing his mind with a sharp reminder of her power. “You  _don’t_ want to hear from me again.”

Rea left the apartment in silence. She did not look back.


End file.
